Department of Physics & Astronomy

Dr. Grady Price Blount

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Narrative Summary:

Grady Price Blount was the founding dean of the former College of Science, Engineering and Agriculture at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He now serves as head of the Department of Applied Sciences. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Texas Space Grant Consortium and Coordinator for Minority-Serving Institutions within the consortium. Prior to joining the Lions, he served as Dean of the former College of Sciences at Angelo SAtate University, and as Assistant Vice President for Research and Associate Graduate Dean at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He also served as the institutional contact for and mentor for the Teresa Heinz Environmental Scholars program. He was a delegate in 2005 to the American Democracy Project. For a complete pdf-formatted copy of his vitae, click here.

He is an interdisciplinary planetary and environmental scientist specializing in solid surfaces and the dynamic forces which shape them. His teaching interests include the traditional fields of remote sensing, geology (including geomorphology and sedimentology), climatology, and astronomy under the auspices of the integrated tenets of Earth System Science. His research areas have included Mars-analog studies, scientific visualization of environmental variables, reconstruction of pre-European landscapes of the Southwest, and technical aspects of satellite remote sensing calibration and normalization. He is a past member of the International Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems. He was a founding member of the Advisory Committee for the Dept. of the Interior's National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive housed at theEROS Data Center . He also served as a liaison Advisory Committee member to theDistributed Active Archive Center (a.k.a. the Land Processes DAAC) located at EROS. This is one of the main data gathering gateways for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise. He built an HRPT satellite ground station for direct reception of environmental satellite data covering southern Texas and Mexico.

Blount participated in the NASA-sponsored Mars: Evolution of Volcanism, Tectonics and Volatiles (MEVTV) study group and he was an invited speaker at the First International Conference on the Environment of Mars. He performed preliminary data analysis on theClementine mission to the Moon, contributing to the construction of the first-ever high-resolution lunar polar mosaic. In 1998 he completed a three-year NASA JOVE fellowship working with the USGS Planetology Field Center to determine the effects of asteroid and comet impacts on the evolution of the Earth's environment. During his previous career as a journalist, he created the radio program StarDate (1978), which Deborah Byrd of the McDonald Observatory later turned into a nationally syndicated PBS radio program.

Education

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Graduate School of Education, 2005.Certificate: Management Development Program

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